Comcast boosts upstream speeds on 6, 8Mbps plans

There are both upsides and downsides to being a Comcast customer. While the company began testing a throttling system for heavy bandwidth users last week, it announced today that it's increasing the upstream speeds free of charge on its Performance and Performance Plus plans.

Users of the Performance service, which currently tops out at 6Mbps down and 384Kbps up, will see their upstream almost triple to 1Mbps (128KB/s). Folks who use the 8Mbps/768Kbps Performance Plus plan, meanwhile, will get an upstream boost to 2Mbps. Comcast also mentions that it can offer doubled downstream speeds on both of those services with its PowerBoost system.

That's not the only speed boost Comcast users can look forward to. The company stresses that it's testing a 50Mbps service in the Twin Cities area (which spans Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minnesota). Also, it "expects to deliver even faster speeds of up to 100Mbps to its customers over the next two years," with speeds as high as 160Mbps a possibility. That said, we also learned last week that Comcast is evaluating a 250GB monthly bandwidth use quota for heavy users. (Thanks to DailyTech for the tip.)